Fanon and Forster- who's being more wretched?

Before I start, I just want to say that it’s quite amusing how as the weeks pass by, blog posts are beginning to look more and more like mini-research papers. (“,)

Anyhow, let’s break down the person who is currently the wretched of my life, Frantz Fanon. I first encountered Fanon in my South Asian lit class last semester, albeit a shorter version, and I must say what struck me most was the difficulty I had in mapping Fanon onto Forster. Because Fanon mapped perfectly onto many of my texts in that module, including more recent works like Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Salman Rushdie’s Fury. I remembering being taken aback by his writing style because the brother was so fierce but I also remember being persuaded by him, as in, I believed that violence was the way to go if the colonized wanted freedom (no offense to Mr.Gandhi). But somehow, I felt like his binaries could not be imposed onto Forster’s novel all that readily thanks to characters like Mrs Moore and Fielding. Furthermore, I can’t completely swallow the idea of doing violence onto colonist characters in the novel, including people like Mrs. Turton and even Major Callendar who is rumoured to have tortured a native in the novel.

Is it because its fiction and Mrs Turton is so obviously caricatured while what Fanon talked about were real people, like that creep Lacoste, stepping over others? Or is it because Fanon wrote by aligning himself with the oppressed while Forster wrote standing outside both camps and as a neutral party? Maybe the neutrality comes to him easy precisely because he himself had to never endure such oppression. Because what we get in Passage is not violent colonization, or violent decolonization for that matter. The riots are mentioned in passing- in short, violence is relegated to the background in Passage. Is Forster imposing his own kind of violence by not fully elaborating the struggles the colonized went through?

In Passage, we get to see relationships, we get to see interaction, motives and presumptions about each community formed by the other. In this sense, I could map Fanon onto Forster but even then I feel like the former falls short. Fanon talks about how the colonist fabricates the colonized subject. But I believe that fabrication or stereotyping, can be expected of anybody. All of us do it, we judge a person on looks, on the kind of community he hails from, his friends, his grades, etc. And that is what Forster shows, how both sides fabricate each other.